BackseatBoss wrote:The thing that I hate the most is that for whatever reason Lithuania is not trying to go to Jonas in the post. Instead they usually just use him as an energy big. In my opinion that's pretty much idiotic. Jonas is shooting around 78% on his FG, a lot of them came from when he was posting up, but he only averages 6.4 FGA per game. If he is supposed to be your star player, he needs to average much more than that, especially since he has been really efficient. Also, I watched that game against Slovenia and I got to say, Lithuania got really lucky in the 4th. Slovenia's main center was grabbing offensive boards but missing layups right next to the basket, Slovenia shot a lot of wide open threes and missed all of them. The only thing Lithuania did well defensively is shut down Dragic.
From what I saw it was the offense that was the issue. I really think they have a problem incorporating their bigs (DM and JV) and it throws them all out of whack. They gave up a bunch of fast break points off of turnovers, a handful of those being from passes involving their bigs. They simply don't know how to get the ball inside. The offense flows much better without those two sometimes, but not because it should. Lithuania will be bottlenecked by their offense until they learn to play to the strengths of their individual players and use a more versatile system. The offense can be fun to watch when they're hitting tons of threes and it's clicking, but hot shooting is a short term thing, not long term.
From the stats I'm looking at every quarter their defense got better but their offense got worse.
